lators immediately (and wisely) fled. Without them, the Spaniards were
essentially blind on an unknown shore. Using their horses, they searched
the hinterland and decided upon an island site just offshore from the mod-
ern Georgetown, South Carolina. There they established a settlement they
named San Miguel de Guadalupe. The site was not a good choice. Almost
immediately the colonists began to die of fever. When Ayllón himself died,
the 150 who were still alive gave up and sailed for Hispaniola. Spain’s first
attempt to create a colony in North America had failed.
An even more ill-fated expedition followed in 1528, when Pánfilo
Narváez landed 400 men and about eighty horses at Tampa Bay. Lured
inland by the hint of a source of gold, he lost touch with his supply ships.
Then he and his men had to live off the Indians. Although initially friendly,
the Indians became tired of the Spaniards’ thefts and began to harass them.
Many of Narváez’s men learned painfully that Indian arrows could pierce
Spanish steel; other Spaniards succumbed to fevers. When the expedition
disintegrated, as quickly happened, it was every man for himself. One of the
men was Cabeza de Vaca.
Cabeza de Vaca made off with a few companions and began what
would be an incredible eight-year odyssey across America. Not knowing
where he was but trying, vaguely, to reach Spanish Mexico, he won Indian
hospitality by acting as a medicine man. As word spread that he could heal
the sick, he not only survived but gathered about him a party of Indian fol-
lowers. Traveling with some of them, he finally encountered a Spanish slav-
ing party far to the west. To his disgust, his fellow Spaniards wanted to
enslave his companions. He admonished the Spaniards, he later wrote,
that we healed the sick and they killed the healthy; and that we came naked
and barefoot and they well dressed and on horses and with lances; and that
we did not covet anything, rather we returned everything that they gave us
and were left with nothing, and the only aim of the others was to steal
everything they found, and they never gave anything to anyone.The Spaniards’ lack of politeness was soon followed by Spanish genocide.
Hernando de Soto had taken part in the conquest of the Inca empire of
Peru; the loot he took there had made him one of the richest Spaniards of his
48 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA